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July 24, 2003 [feather]
The new conservatives

The Philadelphia Inquirer reports on the growing numbers of conservative college students. While the stereotype--as propagated by campus liberals--is that conservative college students are overwhelmingly white, wealthy, and male, the reality is far different, far more complex, and far more interesting. Some numbers:


While College Democrats of America has disappeared altogether from 20 states, its chapters dwindling from 500 in 1992 to fewer than 300 now, the College Republican National Committee has 1,148 campus chapters, and its membership has tripled since 1999.

And an interesting fact: the students who are drawn to conservative groups are increasingly more likely to be interested in escaping the strangulating atmosphere of liberal campus orthodoxy than they are in embracing conservative orthodoxy. For lots of students, it's not about preferring conservative dogma over liberal dogma, but about rejecting dogma altogether. Some quotes from students who recently attended the National Conservative Student Conference in Washington:

[Lisa] Stewart, from Bentley College, said she's "against government control, but mixed on ethical issues like gun control and abortion. I'm usually a Republican, but would change if I liked someone better."

"I don't affiliate with either party," said Rob Maury, 26, a senior at Barton College in North Carolina, who plans to start his own business. He came to the conference, he said, as an antidote to the "rampant anti-intellectualism in popular culture" and "people who get their politics from MTV."

Daniella Alves, 21, said she agrees with the Republican party on "almost all issues" - except its failure to embrace environmentalism and animal rights. She'd like to help change that, said the sophomore social science major from Miami-Dade Community College.

"The only thing that makes a difference is people who view things through the lens of possibility," Alves said earnestly, sounding more New Age than Newt.


And some interesting demographics:

Studies have shown that campus conservatives are increasingly female and middle class. They admire Ronald Reagan and are more patriotic since 9/11.

They oppose speech codes, set-aside student government seats for racial minorities, and lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender groups, and what they see as political correctness.

Increasingly, they are for school prayer and the public funding of church groups and against abortion, a recent study by University of California Berkeley and University of Alabama professors found.

More of them are hawks than doves, the Harvard University Institute of Politics reported in May, noting that support for the war in Iraq outpaces opposition 66 percent to 30 percent. The Harvard study also found that 61 percent of college students like the way President Bush is doing his job.

They aren't into casual sex, according to the UCLA Higher Education Research Institute, which has been surveying incoming freshmen since 1966. Only 42 percent of freshman approve of it, down from 51 percent in 1987.


Among other things, these numbers indicate a generation of young women who have consciously chosen to reject the ideology of radical feminism. They are moving in a conservative direction not because they have no idea what they might be taught in a women's studies course--but because they do. And the irony here is that, despite the conventional campus wisdom that casts conservatives as retrograde, self-serving, and intolerant, these students are the "radical" ones, the ones who are consciously flouting the authority of those who teach them, the ones who are fighting for a more open and tolerant campus.

Catherine Carre, 19, a junior at Pennsylvania State University, recalled how she got an F on an English essay when she wrote an argument against affirmative action in college admissions.

The Masterman High School graduate said she was able to raise her grade by persuading her professor to let her rewrite the paper. This time, she incorporated his pro-affirmative action views as well.

The lesson she learned, Carre said, was "to keep my mouth shut unless I know what the professor likes."


I would lay money on how this went: the professor sees himself not as an ideologue, but as one whose job it is to help students learn to see beyond their prejudices and unexamined assumptions. He does not see himself as particularly political, but rather as one whose clear thinking on questions of power, discourse, oppression, and opportunity has led him to the one right conclusion on the affirmative action issue. Thus, when students like Catherine Carre write essays defending positions he finds abhorrent, he can fail them not for having bad politics (he would never do that), but for being unable to think logically and write clearly. This is how invidiously the politically one-sided academy works. In the absence of balance, professors come to view their opinions as truth, they begin to feel free to penalize students who think differently than they, and they are able to fool themselves into believing that what they are doing is teaching those students to think, when what they are really doing is teaching them that in order to get an A, they must think--or appear to think--like the person who is giving the grade.

The professoriate thinks it is enlightening America's youth, opening vistas of awareness and understanding. But when individual profs behave like this--and a great many do--they tend to turn students of all political persuasions off. It makes you wonder: If the American professoriate wanted to produce a generation of diehard conservatives, what would it do differently?
posted on July 24, 2003 11:01 AM